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Saturday, March 17, 2007
The Courage of Daniel Pearl, Ctd
17 Mar 2007 08:16 pm
A reader writes:
I was a friend of his through high school and college and stayed in touch with him until before he left for overseas. I had many discussions with him about what motivated people and about the nature of evil and power. I have no doubt that the reason he refused sedation is that he did not want to make it easier, in the least, on the killers' consciences. So he was willing to go through hell fully conscious as the price.
If only his murderers had consciences unalloyed by religious fundamentalism. We must remember that they beheaded him for the sake of their God. This was a religious execution.
(Photo: AFP/Getty from January 2002.)
KSM and OBL
17 Mar 2007 07:54 pm
"Here you have a guy — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — who has confessed to planning and directing the worst mass murder ever perpetrated on American soil and has admitted to personally murdering a U.S. citizen in what any reasonably aggressive American prosecutor would call a hate crime, and virtually nobody in the news media has called for putting the man on trial. Worse, virtually nobody has bothered to explain that the willfully erroneous way in which this administration has chosen to deal with the Al Qaeda prisoners from the outset has made it impossible to subject them to anything resembling the normative justice they so richly deserve.
Mohammed can't be brought to trial because the White House had him tortured and, therefore, virtually none of what you read this week could be used against him in a legitimate court of law ..."
And Osama is still at large, building a new base in Pakistan from which to kill more of us.
HRC Update
17 Mar 2007 07:47 pm
Chris Crain, former editor of the Washington Blade, has some things to say about HRC's extremely thin skin when it comes to basic questions of accountability, transparency and bipartisanship. The Blade under Crain was among the first to bust HRC's numbers scam on its actual "membership" a few years ago. Meanwhile, the Blade itself has a new article on the group's $26.4 million building and the cool $160,000 they paid last year to an executive director who quit in 2004. HRC coughed up the actual numbers after this blog raised questions. Money quote:
City records show that the purchase price for the building itself in April 2002 was $9.8 million. Rienfierd said HRC financed the purchase and renovation costs through a $22 million bridge loan from a local bank at an interest rate of 1.4 percent plus the monthly adjusted London Interbank Offered Rate, known as LIBOR. The Wall Street Journal listed that rate at 5.32 percent as of last week, bringing HRC’s mortgage interest to about 6.72 percent for this month. Rienfierd said the rate has been considerably lower during the past three years.
But if they'd invested that money in something else instead (like, er, fighting for gay rights) and paid rent? Who knows? A civil rights organization that has very, very few legislative or organizational achievements at a critical time in the battle for gay equality should not, in my view, be splurging $26 million on a plush new building. It's waste like that that puts smiles on the faces of the religious right - not scrutiny from the blogosphere.
One last word for a while: HRC has said it plans to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and a hate crimes law in this Congressional session. They are not pressing for immigration reform or military service (gay soldiers can wait until Hillary decides it's safe to support them). So let's give them a chance to show what they can do with all those millions of gay people's money. Meanwhile, I'll keep keeping them honest. We've already gotten more info out of them than they have offered in quite a while. Maybe we might even prod them to pass some pro-gay legislation. You never know.
Protecting the Torture Regime
17 Mar 2007 04:55 pm
Gonzales has replaced Kyle Sampson with one Chuck Rosenberg, from the Eastern District of Virginia. One important thing to remember here: this district has been the point of reference for all all cases of torture, assault and homicide involving contractors, including contract soldiers, in the war on terror. Despite many fully investigated cases, the district has done nothing. I've learned a few things about this administration; and one is that it has done all it can both to prevent exposure of its torture policies, to ensure that no serious criminal cases are brought exposing it, and to grant legal impunity for the key civilian implementers of the torture policy.
Face of the Day
17 Mar 2007 04:31 pm
Anthony Vasoli of Chicago stands over the newly dyed Chicago 17 March, 2007 as part of the St. Patrick's Day celebration in Chicago, Illinois. For the past 43 years the Chicago River turns green for the St. Patrick?s Day Parade celebration. (Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)
KSM's Confession
17 Mar 2007 04:02 pm
It doesn't ring true. Robert Baer explains why. Money quote:
I'm told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl's execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM's role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated.
The fruit of torture is bad intelligence. The point of torture is always and only torture.
New Rules
17 Mar 2007 03:30 pm
Bill Maher on top form last night:
Bobby and Marilyn II
17 Mar 2007 03:10 pm
A reader writes:
The Bobby Kennedy-Marilyn Monroe allegations have been bouncing around in the public prints for 30 years now and we are no closer today than we ever were to knowing whether there is any basis for them. It does not surprise me in the slightest to find that the story appears in RFK's FBI file. This is precisely the kind of unverified calumny that Hoover trafficked in. As for the "sheer detail" of the reports, that to me adds nothing to their credence.
Another writes:
I'm a researcher and doc filmmaker who has researched Ms. Monroe extensively since childhood and AP'd a PBS American Masters documentary on her last year - Marilyn Monroe: Still Life. The new FBI document is not new at all. I downloaded it years ago from the FBI's site. That particular document cannot be authenticated. If it were true, you can bet the FBI would not be publishing it.
But it was in the FBI files, right?
Quote for the Day
17 Mar 2007 03:04 pm
"Death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don't have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense. How could it be better that 10,000 or 50,000 or a million people die than that one person be injured?" - John Yoo, defending the torture he helped legalize under Bush.
Yoo also seemed to confirm that waterboarding has been used by the Bush administration and is still being used:
"Does water-boarding (inducing the perception of drowning in someone to make him talk) inflict serious pain?" Yoo asks. "I doubt that the CIA thinks that it does ... or that it is going to stop using the technique, if the stakes are high enough." So despite the new law, the old tactics will be available? "I think so. And more important, so do they ..."
Marty Lederman comments here. Yoo seems completely unaware of just war theory. There is an obvious distinction between the killing necessary in a just war - killing that should nonetheless be minimized and directed solely at legitimate military targets - and torturing defenseless detainees who are already under your complete control. With Yoo, one is tempted to wonder what is worse: his ignorance of basic moral concepts, his support for any means necessary against terrorism, his empowrement at the highest levels of the Bush administration, or the completely dispassionate way in which he discusses the most horrifying acts of sadism and cruelty. One day, we must find a way to bring this war criminal to justice.
(Photo of John Yoo, chief architect of the Bush torture policy, by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)
"Covert"
17 Mar 2007 02:11 pm
I have gotten dizzy trying to keep a grip on the various uses and meaning of the word "covert" in the Plame case. Like you, I'm not an expert. But I don't think you have to accept the maximal claims of either side to see what happened. The bottom line is that there was some doubt about how covert she was - even within the Bush administration. They knew they were very close to the line, if not over it. Hence the bizarre and convoluted downlow media strategy in leaking the information. All that matters to me is their motive. It seems to me clear that at the very least, Rove, Bush and Cheney knew they were playing with fire when they targeted Plame. They thought the journalists would never testify, and they thought they could get away with it. It seems like recklessness to me. The key question for me is why they were so prepared to be so reckless. Was Cheney just furious at being misrepresented in the media? Or did he see knocking down two-bit Wilson as essential to preventing his bad faith with respect to WMD intelligence being exposed? Maybe he feared that if the media pulled at this string, others might get pulled as well. I don't know. Either scenario is plausible. And they're not mutually exclusive. Maybe Cheney was furious and his fury promoted the reckless strategy. And maybe the fury was intensified by knowledge of his own deception.
As time goes by, I'm more inclined to believe that Cheney knew he had deceived the country with respect to WMDs (perhaps with good intentions, fearing the worst, but still knowingly parlaying theories as facts), was alarmed when the military couldn't find even token stockpiles to justify pre-war intelligence, and over-reacted by outing an agent whose covert status was unclear. That's why this still matters. It points to the question of bad faith in persuading a country to go to war. Nothing in this case has added to the evidence of good faith on Cheney's part. And much has pointed in the opposite direction. The charge, if true, is impeachable.
The Courage of Daniel Pearl
17 Mar 2007 01:53 pm
More reliable evidence than that provided by the tortured KSM.
Richardson Helps The Sick
17 Mar 2007 01:08 pm
A Democratic candidate signs a medical marijuana law. Money quote:
"So what if it's risky? It's the right thing to do."
When was the last time you heard a Democrat say that? Congrats, Bill. He gets more and more impressive. Don't miss Crowley's asterisk.
Conservatives Against "24"
17 Mar 2007 01:08 pm
Once again, The American Conservative leads the way. Money quote:
The devotion to "24" and its protagonist demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility. As escapism, "24" is riveting; as a parable for our time, it is revolting.
Rod Dreher comments here. Money quote:
One can certainly understand the attraction of a Bauer figure in these times, just as Dirty Harry was completely understandable as an expression of the popular anxiety of the 1970s. But as Dougherty points out with reference to Bauer, it's a dangerous temptation for conservatives to accept and esteem a fantasy figure who breaks the law -- especially the moral law (e.g., torture) -- in the service of his mission. And conservatives are very quick (and quite accurate) to argue, when it comes to sexuality, that the content of popular culture has real-world consequences by making acceptable previously taboo ideas. As the Jane Mayer piece cited by Dougherty pointed out, "24"'s valorization of torture is having an impact.
I watched Rory Kennedy's HBO documentary, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," all the way through last night. What she captures best is the chronology of it all, something that seems more damning when viewed from a distance - the initial authorization of torture by the president, the widespread understanding by the torturers at Abu Ghraib themselves that they were doing what Rumsfeld wanted, the techniques at Abu Ghraib spelled out in memos, the move of Miller from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to Gitmoize the place through torture, Rumsfeld's temper-tantrum at the lack of good intel from Iraq as his war collapsed beneath him - and then the lies Rumsfeld blatantly told to Congress. In retrospect, Rumsfeld's mastery of the bureaucracy worked. His handling of the fallout from Abu Ghraib was masterful. Even now, no one has been held responsible up the chain of command. Even now, many Americans still don't realize that Abu Ghraib reflected presidential policy. The mistake was in letting anyone find out about it - and, without those photographs, you can be sure that torture advocates, like Charles Krauthammer, would be denying anything of this sort took place at all. The torture bill last year gave legal impunity to Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Yoo, Cambone and Gonzales. A full independent inquiry is still necessary. The next president should demand one.
It's Still A Free Country
17 Mar 2007 12:28 pm
How do I know? Because a bright pink transgendered activist can get herself on every news show in the country with "Impeach Bush" emblazoned all over her ample bosom. She was hotter than Valerie Plame - and always in shot. Like it or hate it, a police state wouldn't let it happen.
Bobby and Marilyn
17 Mar 2007 11:50 am
Did he assist in her suicide? I do not know if the FBI recently disclosed report has any basis in truth - it was compiled by J. Edgar Hoover, after all - but it's a bombshell if accurate:
On the same day, Kennedy had booked out of the Beverley Hills Hotel and flown to San Francisco where he booked into the St Charles Hotel, owned by a friend. "Robert Kennedy made a telephone call from St Charles Hotel, San Francisco, to Peter Lawford to find out if Marilyn was dead yet."
Lawford called and spoke to Monroe "then checked again later to make sure she did not answer". The document claims the housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who had been hired by the actress on the advice of Dr Greenson, then called the psychiatrist. "Marilyn expected to have her stomach pumped out and get sympathy for her suicide attempt. The psychiatrist left word for Marilyn to take a drive in the fresh air but did not come to see her until after she was known to be dead." ...
The FBI report says Kennedy had promised Monroe he would divorce his wife and marry her, but the actress eventually realised he had no intention of doing so. About this time, he had told her not to worry about 20th Century Fox cancelling her contract - "he would take care of everything". When nothing happened, she called him at work and they had "unpleasant words. She was reported to have threatened to make public their affair."
Hence the assisted suicide. Makes Anna Nicole seem banal in comparison, doesn't it? Of course, it should be treated with extreme skepticism: we are told the report "could not be sourced or authenticated" but nonetheless made its way to the very top of the FBI. The sheer detail of the report, including the threat of Joe DiMaggio Sr to kill Kennedy to seek revenge after Kennedy left office, is striking. A sign of Hoover's obsessions? Or a sign of the seriousness of the charge? I have no idea. Here's more context from the writer who discovered the material. Money quote:
One more unclassified piece of this jigsaw puzzle is a 1963 teletype marked "decoded" and "urgent" sent to Hoover soon after the assassination of JFK: "To director: … [deleted] informed that Attorney-General Robert Kennedy made a very secret trip to Los Angeles for a conference with [Chief William H.] Parker during which conference the Attorney-General allegedly told Parker he would replace Director as head of the FBI." No date for this trip is provided. This is the same Parker the secret memo names as having the Monroe telephone records. Hoover was never removed and Kennedy left the administration of President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Over to you, Oliver Stone.
Obama, Wonk
17 Mar 2007 11:30 am
Obsidian Wings has chapter and verse.
Iraq Blogs
17 Mar 2007 10:42 am
A helpful guide. (Hat tip: FG.)
The View From Your Window
17 Mar 2007 08:11 am
Kharagpur, India, 6 am.
The Debate About the Debate
17 Mar 2007 05:23 am
An overview of the storms currently blowing within the gay rights movement. I guess Larry Kramer and I are finally on the same ground.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Protestantism and Condoms
16 Mar 2007 07:27 pm
John McCain needs some coaching, apparently. This is a useful primer:
The Core Conservative Question
16 Mar 2007 07:03 pm
A reader writes:
In several places in the D'Souza review you ask whether a political system "can" ever be neutral. Well, it can't. The question is therefore not whether political frameworks can be neutral, but how and against whom they ought to discriminate. At the basis of the democratic truce lies the presumption that a viewpoint-neutral framework – not absolutely neutral, but still as neutral as possible and consistent with its own survival – is the only fair
and transparent one. But this excludes the true believer, who could never accept a system that proclaims neutrality between truth and error, virtue and vice. It is of course right to put true believers at a strategic disadvantage in this way, but discrimination it undeniably is. Justified it is, neutral it ain't.
As soon as a democratic system becomes sufficiently diverse, the true believer will begin to be unsatisfied with it. For a while the true believer's vision can still be enforced through democratic majorities. But then even the majorities begin to dwindle. At that point the true believer has to decide whether to lie down peacefully and see his beliefs swamped, or whether to turn anti-democratic, to reject the most basic clauses of the democratic contract. D'Souza shows the right nearing that point.
Would the religious right accept defeat gracefully? I do not mean one or two elections, I mean total defeat: Drip by drip, state by state, issue by issue, the culture wars are lost, first in the culture at large, then at the ballot box; there is first a mellowing and then a great falling off of Christian belief across the country; after 20 or 30 years, the US is well set on its way to becoming as secular as Canada. This could happen because although democracy and capitalism are not directly hostile or repressive towards faith, they are still great engines of secularisation, by a slow, relentless process of corrosion. 99% of the religious right would surely accept this with good enough grace, but a toxic remnant may just turn against the systemic engines of secularisation. A self-styled "Stonewall Jackson Brigade" of Christofascist terrorists perhaps, secretly liaising with (the successors of) Al-Qaeda.
The religious right is caught in a terrible dilemma, because they venerate both, the Lord and the constitution. But if it turns out that the classically liberal order prescribed by the US constitution is, in the long run, biased against the maintenance of fundamentalist faith, what will they do? Will they be tempted to tear up the constitution in the service of the Lord?
I agree with this reader's analysis, which is why I felt it necessary to provide an account of a Christianity that can withstand modernity and pluralism in "The Conservative Soul." Such a Christianity isn't fundamentalist. And the incompatibility with real fundamentalism and the American project is at the core of today's debate about conservatism. I'm glad to see D'Souza forcing many conservatives to reject his logical extension of recent developments. But they still have not grappled with the deeper question, I fear. My book tries, at least. I think, in some ways, it is an attempt to redefine conservatism as the antithesis to D'Souza's vision. After reading D'Souza, I understood my own case a little better.
Bill vs Barack
16 Mar 2007 06:25 pm
The latest.
Poseur Alert
16 Mar 2007 06:24 pm
"They are the essential film noir amalgamations of Eve, Salome, and Carmen: there to bring men down through the pulsating syncopations of their glistening orifices," - Stanley Crouch on film noir divas.
Is this the winning 2007 Poseur Alert? Don't Forget To Vote Here!
"Still, In Some Sense, A Cipher"
16 Mar 2007 06:00 pm
Dan Drezner wants to know more about Obama's foreign policy. Make that two of us.
Romney on Immigration
16 Mar 2007 05:30 pm
In 2005, Mitt Romney believed that the McCain-Kennedy immigration proposal was "reasonable." At CPAC this year, Romney declared war on it.
The Base Vs Rudy
16 Mar 2007 05:23 pm
A new website: "Rudy's Really Liberal". And new revelations in a big document dump. Money quote from Rudy:
"I'd give my daughter the money for it [an abortion]."
Uh-oh.
Ending The Ban
16 Mar 2007 05:12 pm
A reader writes:
You can't threaten to suspend military funding in time of war. It would be irresponsible to the troops. Many prominent Democrats on the hill have already said they won't do it under any circumstances. And threatening to cut funds in the name of gay rights, would give opponents a windfall issue of Rovian proportions. Try to picture what Brownback, Gingrich, Coulter, Limbaugh, Santorum, et al would do with the issue. The issue right now in the minds of most Americans is, "Is it fair to discharge excellent soldiers who happen to be gay". Start attaching spending riders and the issue becomes, "Is it fair that our military can't buy protective gear for soldiers because gay activists are upset over don't-ask-don't-tell".
The Military Readiness Enhancement Act is the way to go. SLDN says so, as does Margarethe Cammemeyer.
So when do the Democrats intend to move on that bill? The defensiveness of the reader strikes me as part of the problem. I'm tired of being told by groups like HRC that they cannot risk outcry from the anti-gay right. They've been intimidated. They shouldn 't be. Another reader adds:
What a fabulous idea, to attach language suspending the ban on gay men and women serving in the military to a spending bill. It would be perfect if the appropriate language were attached to the military spending request currently before Congress for a few reasons: 1) the Democrats would be doing a parliamentary maneuver that the Republicans have done for the past few years -- attaching Amendment B to Bill A when B is not really related to A at all, and 2) Bush would be put in the hot seat -- if he vetoed the military spending bill because of his opposition to ban suspension, the base would be hugely livid (not to mention all the "support the troops" people), and if he voted for the spending bill, the base would be livid because he signed something that called for the ban to be suspended. It's a win-win, I tell you! Ach! What am I saying? Bush would sign the spending bill, and then issue a signing statement saying he didn't have to abide by the provision to suspend the ban.
I'd usually leave these tactical questions to groups like HRC. But I fear their tactical objective in the next two years is to elect Senator Clinton, not to advance gay rights.
Kristol and the Christianists
16 Mar 2007 05:11 pm
Bill seems to be having second thoughts about the invasive moralizing of his religious allies. Maybe he should have thought of that, say, a decade ago, when he did all he could to integrate Christian fundamentalism, with its corrosive effect on the right to privacy, into the Republican party. But better late than never, I guess. I can imagine Bill Clinton reading this column and completely losing it. As well he might.
Bill C vs Barack O
16 Mar 2007 04:42 pm
Uglier and uglier.
The Hewitt Trap
16 Mar 2007 04:33 pm
Matt Yglesias explains.
VDH vs DD
16 Mar 2007 04:07 pm
OMG.
My Alliance With The Christianists
16 Mar 2007 03:56 pm
HRC is now accusing me of being a tool of the religious right! Money quote:
HRC's vice president for programs, David Smith, went a step further, accusing Sullivan of advancing the interests of anti-gay groups from the religious right. "There's nobody happier about what Andrew Sullivan is doing than Tony Perkins and James Dobson," Smith said.
LOL. HRC's executive director, Joe Solmonese, has said that I am a "a conservative Republican who's never been willing to acknowledge that Democrats are any better than Republicans for our community." Readers know that I am not now and never have been a Republican, that I endorsed Kerry in 2004 and the Democrats last fall. When I endorsed Bush in 2000, I did so while fully conceding that Gore was better on gay issues. But I'm not just a one-issue person. I do, however, care passionately about gay equality and was working hard for it while Joe Solmonese was an Emily's List operative. All I am asking for is basic transparency and accountability from the biggest gay group out there. My five questions stand. I will publish HRC's full response to them at any length they choose, with no commentary from me. Smearing me is not a response. It's an avoidance mechanism. Answer the questions:
What do you regard as your three most significant legislative or organizational achievements in the last five years?
What percentage of the 2006 budget for all of HRC (both foundation and lobbying group) was taken up by fundraising, events, mortgage payments and administration?
What percentage was devoted to lobbying and organizing?
What are your goals for the 2007 - 2009 legislative session?
How many people are on your bi-partisan board and how many are registered Republicans?
Are these simple matters of fact an unreasonable request?
Face of the Day
16 Mar 2007 03:45 pm
Former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson testifies 16 March 2007 before the US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Capitol Hill in Washington. Plame testified on the outing of her name while working as a covert agent for the CIA in 2003. (Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty.)
Another World
16 Mar 2007 03:32 pm
David Byrne visits the set of "Big Love" and other strange parts of America.
Here's Looking At You
16 Mar 2007 03:28 pm
A fascinating analysis of how differently a trained artist and a trained psychologist look at the same image.
Quote for the Day
16 Mar 2007 02:40 pm
"I and a number of others were critical of president Clinton when he first came into office and almost immediately removed all U.S. Attorneys. But that's not the same thing as what's happening now.
We're seeing a president in his second term go after U.S. attorneys of his own party for reasons that are clearly political: not moving fast enough against targets on the other side of the aisle, succumbing to pressure from Senators for example. That is very, very corrosive, both to morale for U.S. Attorneys as well as in terms of reducing the confidence that the public has that the system is fair and impartial and non-partisan," - former U.S. attorney, Bob Barr, a Reagan appointee who was a Republican congressman from 1995 to 2003.
Reviewing and Re-imagining the Universe
16 Mar 2007 02:37 pm
A wild and weird internet adventure begins here - from the award-winning web artist, Jonathan Harris. (Hat tip: 3Quarks.)
Why Are Women More Religious Than Men?
16 Mar 2007 02:31 pm
A theory.
HRC's Dodge
16 Mar 2007 02:28 pm
Here's what they are telling emailers who complain about their lack of transparency:
Unfortunately, despite Sullivan’s promises to run our responses in their entirety, he instead edited what we wrote. So when we chose to respond, Sullivan did not post our actual responses on his blog. Instead, he has only used our attempts to engage him in productive dialogue as ammunition to further fuel his attacks on HRC.
This is a dodge. I published everything relevant but some throat-clearing from their first email, and subsequently even published the first two banal paragraphs, because they complained. I have provided their own explanation of their "membership" numbers; have linked to criticism, and wider coverage in the gay press. Their insinuation that I haven't fully aired their response is unfair. On every substantive question, I have given them ample space to respond. But let's put this behind us, shall we? I hereby publicly pledge to publish every word they send me without any commentary from me in response to the five simple questions I publicly asked here. As a blogger, I am publicly accountable for living up to such a pledge. Why won't an organization dedicated to transparency take up the offer?
HRC and the Military Ban
16 Mar 2007 02:02 pm
Their current member campaign is to force Peter Pace to apologize for his remarks. I'm fine with that, but isn't it pointless symbolism? Why not a campaign to actually end the ban Pace supports? HRC gives you an opportunity to do so here. They call it "further action". Why not "immediate action"? Gay men and women are risking their lives for their country - and we can't support them now? You can email HRC and ask if they support attaching a suspension of the ban to the next defense spending authorization bill.
The Real Britain
16 Mar 2007 01:36 pm
Say goodbye to the stereotypes.
Your Next Attorney General?
16 Mar 2007 01:14 pm
In your dreams, of course. But I hope the next president considers it.
(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)
End The Ban Now
16 Mar 2007 12:45 pm
Here's a simple challenge to the Democrats. Your two leading candidates do not believe that homosexuality is immoral; another, Bill Richardson, is calling for an end to the ban on openly gay soldiers in the miiltary. Discharges for homosexuality are at a record low, as they often are in wartime, when gay soldiers are needed. (Isn't that in itself a refutation of the policy? That the gay ban is more enforced when we are at peace? If gay soldiers are a real threat to military effectiveness, shouldn't discharge rates go up in wartime?) The public overwhelmingly supports openly gay service. The U.S.'s closest allies, including Britain and Israel, allow openly gay people to serve. And the Democrats have an obvious opening to achieve this: attach an indefinite suspension to the ban to an upcoming defense spending bill. If HRC were more than a financial wing for the Democrats, they'd be pushing this proposal on the Dems right now. Many moderate Republicans might support it. Even Ramesh Ponnuru does. So why not?
Obama And Woods II
16 Mar 2007 12:00 pm
I knew the piece would raise hackles. It did mine. But it was worth reading nonetheless, in my view. One reader sums up the views of many of you:
Sailer is culturally illiterate. Obama didn't create the one drop rule that pervades American society, he just lives under it. He points to Tiger Woods as an alternative to Obama without
mentioning that Woods is the exception, not the rule. His mother's ethnic identity as an Asian undoubtedly informed his decision to dub himself Cablinasian (a distinction fraught with its own psychodramas--why Caucasian first?). As a product of a black/Asian family, his family history plays outside of the white-black narrative that pervades our national history and led to the persistence of the tragic mulatto in 19th century American fiction.
More relevant figures that Sailer might have mentioned if he were intellectually honest are Halle Berry and Mariah Carey. Like Obama, they were the products of divorced black fathers and white mothers raised mostly by their white families. Despite their being more fair-skinned than Obama and thus more likely to "pass," they have both been widely recognized as black, especially as they have gotten older (see: Berry's Oscar triumph or Carey's R&B/hip-hop heavy comeback).
This is not the story of a part-white man abandoning his family. It's the story of a part-black boy, becoming a man, and realizing that his mother's race didn't matter much in the eyes of strangers. An article this ignorant of America's racial history could only be pubished in Pat Buchanan's magazine.
Another adds:
Sailer may have read Obama’s book looking for a slant. I have to assume you haven’t if you think his reading is any way correct. Barack speaks often in his book of the love and support of his maternal grandparents. He spent most of his teenage years with them. When he discusses his late teenage and adults years and coming to grips with black identity, it's hard for me to see that as 'rejecting' his white grandparents or white identity. I'm just an ordinary white guy, and the first few years out of my parents’ home and on my own were also a time for soul-searching and finding my own identity. I didn't reject my parents as much as forge my own place in the world, and neither did Barack.
I haven't read the book, but plan to. You can get it here and make your own mind up.
Don't Read, Mickey
16 Mar 2007 11:46 am
Some news from Details' blog - yes, they have a blog: gay men allegedly make the best bosses.
The Weather Is So Depressing
16 Mar 2007 11:43 am
The mind drifts to the Monkees. Yes, they really did once make TV this weird.
Galloway Blows A Gasket
16 Mar 2007 11:40 am
Caught on video. The Times of London blogger, Danny Finkelstein, claims credit.
Thinking About Alberto
16 Mar 2007 11:35 am
If Gonzales is cashiered, as now seems likely, who will replace him? McNulty is just as implicated. A figure above the fray? Bush can't risk it. Miers? A no-go. The replacement will tell us a great deal about how scared the Bush people are of real, independent scrutiny. Which may leave them with the option of ... going back to where they started and keeping Gonzales, whatever the fallout.
The Right vs D'Souza
16 Mar 2007 11:31 am
A really encouraging symposium at NRO. Peter Berkowitz's response is worth a special look.
The View From Your Window
16 Mar 2007 09:14 am
Chicago, Illinois, 7.30 am.
The Case Against Gonzales
16 Mar 2007 09:07 am
This three-part indictment by the WaPo's Andrew Cohen is as devastating as it is thorough. Begin here, continue here and get really angry around here.
Woods and Obama
16 Mar 2007 08:22 am
In provocative essay in the American Conservative, Steve Sailer contrasts the racial attitudes of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama:
Woods turned down Nike’s suggestion that because African-American celebrities are so popular today, he should identify himself solely as black. He didn't want to disown his mother. Woods instead calls himself black and Thai, or, at times, "Caublinasian," in tribute to his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestors.
From the age of ten onward, though, Obama desperately wants to be black: "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." Honolulu's paucity of African-Americans means he has to learn to be black from the media: "TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style."
He cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says he "ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites," even though he surely realizes that his media-sensation status stems from how much white people love highly accomplished blacks who speak with white accents.
Sailer is often blunt, and somewhat callous, I think, in refusing to empathize with the real tensions and difficulties Obama has had to grapple with in a very multicultural life. But his essay is stimulating nonetheless. The account of Obama's alcoholic, absent, polygamous father is the kind of thing you keep in mind when considering the psyche of a possible president.
A Special Offer
16 Mar 2007 06:55 am
My new corporate overlords, The Atlantic, are offering a special subscription rate to the print magazine for Dish readers - at just $1.50 an issue. If you enjoy reading the work of Hitch, Steyn, Rauch, Easterbrook, Bowden, Fallows, Postrel, Flanagan, and many others, be my guest.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
"It Smells Like The Art-Teacher's Office"
15 Mar 2007 09:27 pm
Homer gets some medical marijuana. A minor classic.
Contra Savage (And Me)
15 Mar 2007 09:03 pm
A defense of Garrison Keillor.
Your Money and Big Ag
15 Mar 2007 08:20 pm
The Senate throws another $15 billion of loose change to the argicultural sector. Just in case the current annual $8 billion subsidy doesn't keep them content.
Twisting In The Wind
15 Mar 2007 07:40 pm
"I'm not calling on Gonzales to resign, but I think it's more likely than not the way things look right now, and I obviously wouldn't be upset about it," - Rich Lowry, NRO.
Email From the Closet
15 Mar 2007 07:07 pm
A reader writes:
I am married, a father of two, and am homosexual. I am faithful to my wife and have never taken a male lover. The only individuals that know the truth have been my confessors and a few close friends. Life has been a struggle at times, and I might have made different decisions had the opportunity presented itself. That said, I love my kids and my wife and am blessed with a good life.
Sometimes, when I read your blog, I feel as if you would consider me a hypocrite. There is such arrogance in the gay community, and sometimes I sense that you feel morally superior at least to those who have not chosen the open path you did. I could be wrong. That said, I support your vision for the gay community, and I appreciate your blog for shedding greater light on these issues. My children fortunately won't have to experience the shame that I was forced to endure as a young man bearing this dreaded secret. I don't merely teach my girls compassion, but acceptance, and in time, I will tell them about my own personal journey. I feel no need to hide it anymore, although I realize that there are dangers to my openness. Sometimes it seems that society can accept either gay or straight but they can't handle the graduated middle. We are hated by both sides.
I can only hope that one day, there is neither jew nor greek, slave nor free, gay nor straight, that the Church will come to understand the true complexities of human sexuality and foster genuine and moral ways to live out one's life authentically. Soldier on.
I hope the church hierarchy will one day see this as well. It can be so afraid at times. The actual church - the people of faith - have already moved forward on this. As for the notion that I regard the closet as something to which I am morally superior, I really don't. One reason I have long opposed outing is that I don't thnk it's possible to know the full internal conscience of another human being, and the judgment he or she has made. Life is complicated. Only God knows. Who are we to judge? The point of the gay rights movement, to my mind, is not to promote the concept of being gay, but to enhance the possibilities for all people to be truly themselves. In the end, who you are is so much more than sexual orientation; but it cannot exclude such an orientation, of whatever kind, if it is to describe us adequately.
Toles on Pace
15 Mar 2007 06:27 pm
The Pakistan Problem
15 Mar 2007 06:16 pm
It's real - and terrifying. In so many ways, Pakistan is more threatening than Iran or Iraq. It already has a nuke; it is harboring a safe haven for al Qaeda; its strongman may be overplaying his hand; and a coup could bring Islamists to power. Crooked Timber wonders why the blogosphere is not more exercized about this.
Rove Involved?
15 Mar 2007 05:41 pm
I never thought he'd be dumb enough to leave a pixel trail. But here's the latest from the U.S. attorneys' scandal:
New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House adviser Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged.
The e-mails also show that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general. The e-mails directly contradict White House assertions that the notion originated with recently departed White House counsel Harriet Miers, and was her idea alone.
Uh-oh.
Kos and the "Liberaltarians"
15 Mar 2007 05:36 pm
Where has the love gone?
Muscular Christianity
15 Mar 2007 05:34 pm
Godmen has a nineteenth-century fore-runner.
More Wow
15 Mar 2007 05:19 pm
A reader writes:
Reading "The Big Wow!" reminded me of two other takes on consciousness, the universe, and connectedness, so to speak. One notion comes from the Tao Te Ching (52):
In the beginning was the Tao.
All things issue from it;
all things return to it.The second notion is termed "process thought" or "process theology." It is a theory of God formulated in modern times by Alfred North Whitehead around 1925 and carried on by, among others, Charles Hartshorne, student of Whitehead, and David Ray Griffin. My take on it is rudimentary. Griffin states the following:
"[N]ature is comprised of creative experiential events. The term 'events' indicates that the basic units of reality are not enduring things, or substances, but momentary events. Each enduring thing, such as an electron, an atom, a cell, or a psyche, is a temporal society, comprised of a series of momentary events, each of which incorporates the previous events of that enduring individual."
My understanding of process theology (also called naturalistic theism) is that God is - and becomes - the repository of all these experiential events. In Hartshorne's words,
"How can I know what it will mean to posterity that I now listen to Mozart for an hour? Perhaps nothing of any significance. And this applies to much of my life. But there is One to whom it may mean something. For while God is already familiar with Mozart He is not already familiar with the experience I may now have of Mozart. . .
In this sense we can interpret 'heaven' as the conception which God forms of our actual living, a conception which we partly determine by our free decisions but which is more than all our decisions and experiences, since it is the synthesis of God’s participating responses to these experiences. It is the book which is never read by any man save in unclear fragmentary glimpses; but is the clearly given content of the divine appreciation."
To date, of my studies regarding the problem of evil, process theology comes closest to providing me a view that I can live with - that is, a view of God that I can live with. Otherwise, I once again slip into agnosticism.
The Resurrection of ACT-UP?
15 Mar 2007 04:45 pm
Peter Pace provokes a response.
Running Against Bush
15 Mar 2007 04:43 pm
It's what allies now have to do if they are going to get elected. Even the British Tory ones. Even if they have to manufacture a rift.
Face of the Day
15 Mar 2007 04:34 pm
Marco Werner of Switzerland driver of the #2 P1 Audi Sport North America Audi R10 TDI during practice for the 55th Annual Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring on March 14, 2007 at the Sebring International Raceway in Sebring, Florida. (Photo by Gavin Lawrence/Getty Images)
Are Neocons History?
15 Mar 2007 04:12 pm
Jake Weisberg thinks so.
Hope in Baghdad?
15 Mar 2007 04:11 pm
A reader tackles my earlier post:
Don't make the mistake of judging the effectiveness of the surge on the levels of violence and militia activity. This has been a successful insurgency because the bad guys avoid outright confrontation by melting into the civilian population when it suits them. Since we are temporarily flooding Baghdad with troops, the insurgents are wisely lying low and waiting for a more advantageous moment to start the slaughter again. Notice that there has not been a significant increase in the number of insurgents being turned in to the authorities. That's because their people, be they Shia or Sunni are hiding them, or at least not ratting them out. The effectiveness of the surge can only be judged by the attitudes of the Iraqi people toward the American presence, as well as how much the Sunni and the Shia are willing to get along and work together. So the surge can only indirectly help these issues by decreasing the daily violence as an exacerbating factor.
If you truly think that it is worth American time, money, and blood to play marriage counselor to a dysfunctional, crime-ridden country with three competing factions and a heavy dose of Islamofacsist terrorists on the side, then keep rooting for the surge. This is no longer about American honor. The surge is about the Bush administration strategy of using band aids to hold the whole mess together just until they can get out of office and claim that Iraq wasn't lost on their watch. Bringing in Petreus was like getting a surgeon for a hospice patient. As long as there are enough people willing to believe that the surge "just might work," the administration will keep up this farce no matter how many lives are lost and tax dollars are wasted.
I take the point. I have favored redeployment to Kurdistan and the borders. But as a simple practical matter, that redeployment is not going to take place under this president, so far as we can tell. Under a parliamentary system, he would have been forced to resign by now. But he's there for two years, we are conducting a "surge" and it is not crazy to wish it well. The truth is: none of us knows what is really going on there. I'm just doing my best to deal with what little we do know, and not to succumb to knee-jerk despair on the one hand and denial on the other. If there's good news, I'm not going to ignore it.
Clinton Clarifies
15 Mar 2007 04:08 pm
There is nothing immoral about being gay. That wasn't so hard, was it?